“You see, dear colleague, over there lie three patients of mine. How nicely adorned the graves are! It is truly a divine garden, and the bodies are the seeds. It’s a grand thought, to be the divine sower!”
Context: cholera was resurgent at the time.
(Fliegende Blätter, Munich, 1848)
“They dismiss me as a troublesome foreigner, and yet I’ve got a proper passport from friendly Russia!”
(Lustige Blätter, Berlin, 1905)
Doctor: “Your ailment isn’t really all that dangerous — but three out of every ten people still die from it!”
Patient: “Pardon, Doctor, are the three already dead?”
(Fliegende Blätter, 1904)
From the pastoral letter of Cardinal Mercier in Brussels: “If God allows the germs of a contagious disease to spread among your ranks, the most glorious prospects are destroyed for the moment. Therefore, above all, place your trust in God.”
(Ulk, Berlin, 1916) (How’s that for an odd bit of wartime propaganda?)
“I wish I were a gold coin, I’d’ve bought the Ehrlich-Hata beforehand!”
(Lustige Blätter, Berlin, 1910)
(See this cartoon for more context on this syphilis cure.)
“The plague take all the Englanders!” cried Uncle Krüger before fleeing.
“I already have!” said the plague, pouncing on Glasgow.
(Lustige Blätter, Berlin, 1900)
(Paul Kruger was the president of the South African Republic during the Boer War against the British. Glasgow was suffering from a small outbreak of plague at the time.)
“Juicy, well-fed bacteria freshly served at all times.” (Resoundingly disastrous success guaranteed.)
The Koch Bacteria Pub
(Max Pettenkofer was a famous Bavarian hygienist whose environmental explanations of disease were then in the process of being eclipsed by the new germ theory, of which Robert Koch was perhaps the most famous German proponent. This cartoon appeared just as the fifth cholera pandemic was cresting in Europe.) (The caption is cropped from this image; see link for original text.)
(Berliner Wespen, Berlin, 1884)
(This image is accompanied by a lengthy poem for pandemic times; just a few phrases here.)
Oh, maiden, the power of your beauty
Has kindled me so powerfully
That my body temperature
Is so high as only with typhus;
It increases to 40,5,
My pulse beats as never before,
One hundred beats per minute,
That is how much feeling you arouse in me.
….
Oh, most beautiful, see my fever!
You are its antiphlogisticum,
My hydropathic foment,
Known for working eminently.
Let’s be allopaths here,
Be ice and cool my pain,
Yet when kissing I’ll say later:
Similia similibus.
(Fliegende Blätter, Munich, 1870)
(A farmer woman wants to visit her son in prison.) Prison warden: “I’m sorry I can’t accommodate your wish, dear lady, two days ago the typhus broke out here.”
Farmer woman: “Oh for God’s sake, how is that possible, how could he have gotten out of there?”
(Some untranslatable wordplay here, with the farmer woman confusing “typhus” [Typhus] and “type” [Typus], as in, “the type of guy who would try to break out of prison.”)
(Fliegende Blätter, Munich, 1873)
“Let’s give the Russians a fever remedy — I mean something to raise the fever!”
(Ulk, Berlin, 1918)
(Lachen links, Berlin, 1926)
Mixes up simple numbers–telephone operator.
Opens mouth up to 42 cm–people’s representative.
Keeps looking eastward–communist party secretary.
Has an unusually hard posterior–defense minister.
Suffers from chronic sleeping sickness, awakes only as the office is closing–office worker.
Buckles his belt to the last hole–worker.
The Napoleon of the Balkans: “Guys, wait just a minute! If I’ve got cholera, I can’t march into Constantinople!”
(Kladderadatsch, Berlin, 1912) (The figure lampooned here was Radko Dimitriev, the Bulgarian general during the First Balkan War who directed the failed assault on the Chataldzha lines outside of Constantinople just weeks before this cartoon was published.)
“What do you want, I don’t have cholera, I’m just drunk!”
“Brother, believe me, he’s just pretending!”
(print from the 1830s, via National Library of Medicine)
A farmer comes to the doctor to get vaccinated. The doctor, already busy vaccinating several women, tells him to wait in the next room and just undress for the time being. The farmer goes out and after a quarter of an hour, to the horror of the doctor, comes in again stripped down to his shirt:
“If you don’t step outside, you insolent fellow,” the doctor yells, “get dressed again immediately!”
“Yes, what do I know, Doctor,” says the farmer, “where one is vaccinated.”
(Fliegende Blätter, Munich, 1871)
“I shouldn’t drink schnapps, I shouldn’t get angry, otherwise I’ll get the cholera — but if I don’t drink schnapps, I get angry, so schnapps and cholera rather than anger and cholera.”
Peter Carl Geissler, likely 1830s. (National Library of Medicine)
Sic Transit Pestilentia 